the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it.

There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.

Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.

It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.

A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.

Charity is an ugly trick. It is a virtue grown by the rich on the graves of the poor. Unless it is accompanied by sincere revolt against the present social system, it is a cheap moral swagger. In former times it was used as fire insurance by the rich, but now that the fear of Hell has gone along with the rest of revealed religion, it is used either to gild mean lives with nobility or as a political instrument.

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.